Iran: Empire of the Mind (44 page)

In the early years of the revolution Khomeini and the IRP had to fight off some formidable enemies, internal and external. But in each case, true to his guiding principles, it tended to be Khomeini that took the initiative, hitting his opponents with preemptive strikes—at least with his internal adversaries. As with the French and Russian revolutions (in the former case, there may be something to it), it has been argued that terror and repression were forced on the Iranian revolutionaries, who otherwise would have been humane and tolerant, by the turn of events, the pressure of war, and the viciousness of their enemies. But this does not stand up to scrutiny. Although he was reacting to events in a supple way, from the beginning Khomeini was fully aware that if he allowed his enemies to take the initiative, he might not get a second chance. He ruthlessly eliminated his opponents.

The two most serious challenges were from the MKO and Saddam Hossein, but there were others too. The MKO, having initially supported the revolution, were attacked by Khomeini in November 1980 (he labelled them
monafeqin
—the hypocrites—a term that recalled those who had apostatised after declaring loyalty to the Prophet Mohammad). He had their leader imprisoned for ten years on a charge of spying for the Soviet Union,
⁹
and
hezbollahis
attacked the group’s headquarters. The MKO fought back with demonstrations and street violence, and then with bombs, managing to kill many of Khomeini’s supporters before their leadership was driven into exile. Two bombs at the headquarters of the IRP in June 1981 killed over seventy of Khomeini’s closest companions and advisers, including his right-hand man, Ayatollah Beheshti. Large numbers of MKO supporters were killed (as many as several thousand, some of them executed publicly
¹⁰
) or imprisoned. From exile, at first in
Paris and later in Iraq, the MKO kept up its opposition and its violent attacks, but dwindled over time to take on the character of a paramilitary cult, largely subordinated to the interests of the Baathist regime in Iraq.

In addition Khomeini and his supporters had been fighting moves for autonomy in Azerbaijan, and an armed rebellion by the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) in Iranian Kurdistan, which was not finally crushed until 1984. The last major political group not aligned to Khomeini and his followers were Tudeh (with whom most of the Feda’i had allied themselves, after a split). They had supported Khomeini, on the wooden-headed Marxist basis that the revolution of 1979 was a petty-bourgeois revolution that would be a prelude to a socialist one. In 1983 Khomeini turned on Tudeh, accusing them of spying for the Soviets and plotting to overthrow the Islamic regime. Seventy leading members were arrested; there were some executions, and televised confessions. Tudeh and the Feda’i were banned, leaving the IRP and the small Freedom Party as the only ones still permitted to operate (the Freedom Party still continues in very restricted circumstances, under its leader Ebrahim Yazdi).

War

In September 1980 Saddam Hossein’s forces invaded Iran, beginning an eight-year war and intensifying pressure on the Iranian regime. Opinion differs over the origins of the Iran/Iraq war: whether Saddam opportunistically attacked Iran at a moment of perceived Iranian weakness, in the hope of snatching some quick gains in the Shatt-al Arab and elsewhere (attempting to put right a border dispute that had been resolved unfavourably for Iraq in the previous decade); or whether Iranian religious/revolutionary propaganda in 1979/1980, apparently directed at starting a revolution among Iraqi Shi‘as and destroying his regime, left him little choice. But Saddam was the aggressor, invading and occupying Iranian territory, and Iranian talk of exporting religious revolution (of which one of the few concrete results was the Iranian contribution to the establishment of Hezbollah in Lebanon in the early ’80s) had faded by the end of that immensely destructive war. As many as one million Iranians were killed or injured, and a whole generation was stamped anew with
the symbolism of Shi‘a martyrdom. In addition to the regular army and the Pasdaran, large numbers of
Basij
volunteers (including boys as young as 12) were recruited. The regime constantly harped on Ashura, Hosein and Karbala to maintain support for the war and to motivate the troops. The huge casualties on the Iranian side resulted partly from the human wave tactics they employed against the Iraqis, who were normally better-equipped. The technological imbalance was the result of the policy of western nations who, despite their declared neutrality, sent a variety of up-to-date weapons to the Iraqis while keeping the Iranians starved of spare parts for the weapons the Shah had bought in the previous decade. The arsenal supplied to Iraq included chemical weapon technology that was used against Iranian soldiers as well as Kurdish civilians in the north of Iraq, whom Saddam treated as rebels. The war also had the effect of physically dividing Iranian Shi‘as from the shrine cities of Najaf, Karbala and Samarra.

Iraqi gains at the outset of the war (which caused huge damage in Khuzestan and the flight of hundreds of thousands of refugees) were wiped out by an Iranian counteroffensive in the spring of 1982, which recaptured Khorramshahr and forced Saddam to withdraw to the border. But the Iranians then amplified their war aims, demanding the removal of Saddam and huge war reparations. Thereafter it was the turn of the Iraqis to go onto the defensive, but the Iranians were able only to make minor territorial gains (the most notable being the capture of the Fao peninsula in February 1986). The hope of a Shi‘a rising to support the Iranian attacks in southern Iraq proved an illusion, like Saddam’s hope of an Arab rising in Khuzestan in 1980, and the land war became a stalemate.

From 1984 Saddam attacked Iranian shipping in the Persian Gulf, trying to damage Iran’s oil exports. The Iranians responded in kind, resulting in what became known as the Tanker War. The US and other non-combatant nations moved ships into the Persian Gulf to protect shipping in international waters, but in July 1988 a US warship (
USS Vincennes
) under a disastrously gung-ho commander, sailed into Iranian territorial waters in pursuit of some Iranian gunboats and after a series of bungles shot down an Iranian civilian airliner with a pair of surface-to-air missiles, killing
290 people. The Reagan administration gave explanations that contained more misleading inaccuracies and self-justifications than contrition, and later awarded the commander of
Vincennes
a campaign medal (many Iranians still believe that the destruction of the airliner was not an accident but a deliberate act). Another less than glorious episode in the US/Iran relationship took place earlier, in 1986, when US officials brought a pallet of spare parts for Iran’s Hawk ground-to-air missiles from Israel to Tehran (plus a chocolate birthday cake from a kosher bakery in Tel Aviv and other presents) in what later became known as the Iran/Contra affair. The exposure and failure of the venture stood as another warning of the perils of making contact between the two countries, and of the divide of misunderstanding between them
¹¹
.

As stalemate prevailed in the land war, the Iranians and Iraqis bombarded each other’s capitals and other towns indiscriminately with long-range missiles, and with bombs dropped from aircraft, killing many civilians (the War of the Cities). Toward the end, Iraq had the upper hand in these exchanges, and in the land war was able to retake Iraqi territory at Fao and elsewhere, bringing the front line back almost exactly to where it had been in September 1980. Finally, with the terrible cost of the war mounting and no sign of the dream of a March to Karbala being realised, Khomeini was persuaded by Majles Speaker Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani to accept what Khomeini called the chalice of poison. Rafsanjani, perhaps right for the wrong reason, had used the
Vincennes
incident to insist that the US would never allow Iran to succeed in the war. Khomeini allowed President Khamenei (elected in 1981 and reelected in 1985) to announce, in July 1988, that Iran would accept UN resolution 598, which called for a ceasefire.

Death and Reconstruction

Khomeini died on 3 June 1989, and his funeral at the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery drew crowds and scenes of mass emotion comparable only with those that had greeted his return from exile ten years before. At one point the coffin had to be rescued by helicopter from distraught mourners seeking pieces of his shroud as relics. Khomeini’s last months had been
overshadowed by the hard decision to end the war with Iraq, and this may have affected his health, but he was also suffering from cancer and heart disease. One significant event in these last months was what is conventionally called the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in February 1989 (some have suggested it would be more accurately be described as a
hokm
– a religious judgement). It seems that Khomeini had been made aware of Rushdie’s book some months earlier, but had dismissed it as unimportant (he had not even banned it from being imported). Reconsidering the question later (after demonstrations by Muslims in Britain and riots in Kashmir and Pakistan) he then delivered the fatwa as a deliberate act, to reassert his claim (and Iran’s claim) to the leadership of Islam.
¹²
It was another classic Khomeini move, which trumpeted Iran’s Islamic and revolutionary uniqueness, and made more difficulties for those who might have wanted to bring Iran back out of isolation into some kind of normality.

Another event occurred in these last months, which illustrates again the degree to which Khomeini had been and remained an enigma even among the ulema. Early in January 1989 Khomeini sent a letter to the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, observing accurately that communism now belonged in the museum of history; and that before he fell into the snare of materialistic capitalism, Gorbachev should study Islam as a way of life. At first impression this seems an odd suggestion, but perhaps Khomeini sensed an affinity with Gorbachev—as an unconventional thinker hedged in by unsympathetic and less imaginative minds. The form of Islam that Khomeini recommended upset many of his ulema colleagues—he commended to Gorbachev not the Qor’an nor any of the conventional works but instead the writings of Ibn Arabi, Avicenna and Sohravardi. With the letter he sent three of his closest companions and pupils, versed in Islamic mysticism. Gorbachev thanked them and expressed his pride at having received a personal letter from the Emam. But the letter attracted criticism from clergy in Qom, some of whom upbraided Khomeini in an open letter for having recommended mystics and philosophers. Khomeini responded with a ‘letter to the clergy’ that vented the frustrations of a long life spent enduring the criticism of more traditionally-minded mullahs:

This old father of yours has suffered more from stupid reactionary mullahs than anyone else. When theology meant no interference in politics, stupidity became a virtue. If a clergyman was able, and aware of what was going on [in the world around him], they searched for a plot behind it. You were considered more pious if you walked in a clumsy way. Learning foreign languages was blasphemy, philosophy and mysticism were considered to be sin and infidelity… Had this trend continued, I have no doubt the clergy and seminaries would have trodden the same path as the Christian Church did in the Middle Ages.
¹³

Ascent through the ranks of the mojtaheds had before the revolution been an informal process, but through the 1980s it became much more structured; policed and controlled by Khomeini and his followers.
¹⁴
As the hierarchy of Iranian Shi‘ism came under control, so did doctrine, attempting to create out of the previous plurality a conformism to a single idea of Shi‘ism. In the ’90s this development went further, with examinations set up for aspiring mojtaheds, and political loyalty (and adherence to the velayat-e faqih) more important than piety, depth of religious understanding, intellectual strength and the approval of a loose group of senior clerics, as had previously been the case. A new group of political ayatollahs, selected in this new way, proliferated;
¹⁵
while others, more deserving in traditional terms, remained mere mojtaheds.

This meant that the revolution had instituted a religion controlled by the state and subordinated to state interests, oddly similar, from that perspective, to the
din-e dawlat
the Shah had earlier attempted as part of the White Revolution—with the difference that this State was headed by a mojtahed rather than a monarch. By the mid to late ’90s some independent voices warned of the dangers of the new situation. Notable among them was the thinker and theologian Abdolkarim Soroush, who called for a secular government and predicted that otherwise, the compromises and hypocrisies of politics and government would discredit religion in Iran and alienate the young.
¹⁶
This is precisely what has happened (the corollary has been an underground resurgence among intellectuals of the nationalism of the 1920s/1930s pattern, idealising pre-Islamic Iran and blaming failures of development on the Arab conquest—appearing, ironically, to celebrate the Cyrus-nostalgia most had rejected from the lips of the last Shah
¹⁷
).

Another voice to take a similar line has been Ayatollah Montazeri.
¹⁸
After the death of Beheshti, Montazeri had emerged in the ’80s as the figure most likely to succeed Khomeini as Supreme Leader. Montazeri had been a loyal supporter of Khomeini, and an important theorist for the principle of
velayat-e faqih
. But toward the end of the ’80s he fell out with Khomeini. The details of this are not entirely clear. Montazeri certainly sent a brave letter to Khomeini, which was published, that protested against the massacre in prison of thousands of political prisoners, mainly former members of the MKO (the massacre followed a final, absurd, doomed offensive by MKO military units from Iraq into Iranian territory just after the July 1988 ceasefire):